I attended a wedding this weekend, a couple that my wife knows through her work. It was nice and all. But the pastor annoyed me. Oh, he spoke well and convincingly and right purtily. *grin* But he delved quite a bit into what I call apologetic revisionism. Twisting and contorting Old Testament scripture and Jewish tradition to rationalize and prove Jesus’ divinity.

For example, at one point he made reference to the Last Supper being a Passover meal, and Passover being a celebration of the coming Messiah. Yes, you heard me right, and yes, I heard him right. I did a mental “Wha-wha-whaat?!” Excuse me, but according to the Rugrats Passover special (*grin*), the Jewish holiday of Passover was a celebration of God’s supposed slaughter of Egyptian children and passing over the Hebrew households and the supposed eventual exodus of the Hebrews out of Egypt. It has nothing to do with any messiah. (With a slight exception which I’ll get to….)

The pastor then mentioned that during the dinner, Jesus specifically picked up the “Messiah Cup” that is part of the Passover meal and did his “take, drink,” thing with it. OK, two things: First of all, I’d never heard of Jesus doing this Messiah Cup thing and I’d read the Gospels countless times. So I reread the Gospels, and yep, no mention of a Messiah Cup at all. From where did this pastor pull this bit of fiction out of?

Then, never having heard of a “Messiah Cup” before I did a Google for it, and nothing. Not a single hit. But, being a very curious and usually thurough person, I looked harder into the Passover Sedar, and did find this: There are four cups involved in the Passover dinner and each one supposedly has a meaning. However, there’s very little consensus as to what the cups mean. Some Jewish scholars relate them to Hebrew kings, some to matriarchs, and one 18th century rabbi named Vilna Gaon relates them to four aspects, or promises, of God. One of them related to the promise of “I will redeem.” This is a VERY loose connection to the Christian concept of the Messiah.

Forgetting for a moment that this one concept of one of the Passover cups was started in the 18th century, and there’s NO mention on the Gospels of Jesus taking one particular cup during the Last Supper, the whole concept of “messiah” has been twisted by Christianity. The word “messiah” in Judaism means a prophet annointed by God, and it’s a title that has been applied to many people in Jewish tradition. The concept of messiah meaning “savior” didn’t come about until the 1st century (the era of Jesus) when Jewish persecution was quite high and many Jewish cults were looking for and creating leaders that would save them from the persecution.

In other words, whatever twisting around in the meaning of “Messiah” during and since the 1st century comes after the Last Supper (if it actually happened) where there was absolutely no connection to a Messiah at that time.

So this pastor continues a practice of revisionism using at best rationalizations and lies at worst to justify the religion. It begins with such inane rationalizations as saying the OT Isaiah prophesy of “his name shall be Immanuel” when his name was, if I recall, let me see… “Jesus”. (Or actually, Joshua if you really want to get specific considering his name in scripture is Iesous (Greek) which was a translation from the Hebrew Jehoshua.)

The Jesus is retrofitted as the prophesised “Christos, Messias” by saying “well, Emmanuel means ‘God with us,’ so that must mean Jesus is God with us, so Jesus is God or the Savior.” Forgetting of course that all Hebrew names have meaning, and nearly all of them relate to God in some way. So that if Isaiah had said “his name shall be David,” they’d say that applied to Jesus because David means “God’s strength” and what is Jesus but the incarnation of God’s strength, etc etc.

Anyway, I don’t know who I’m more upset with. It’s the job of the religious leader to sell their religion, to justify and rationalize and convince people to believe using whatever means necessary. So can I blame him? What I’m upset mostly with, I guess, are people in general. Because I know that 90% of the people listening to him will walk away unquestioning. Will believe whatever he says because he said it. And surely a pastor, a Man o’ God, wouldn’t be in error, or even lie or deceive. So they believe and never question.

And that’s why our country is in the state it’s in.

Back last October I wrote a blog regarding some misconceptions about the Big Bang:

“Mind-Blowing Big Bang Developments.”

In it I describe how like most people, I suffered under a completely misguided and erroneous misconception of what the Big Bang was. Like most people I thought it was everything collected in a single point and exploding in an instant out. But I’d also heard that scientists knew the universe to be infinite in size. This didn’t mesh, so I did some asking and questioning, and come to find out, yes the universe is infinite and no, the Big Bang didn’t at all happen like I and most people thought.

Well, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has an article today pointing to The Angry Astronomer (sheesh, these astronomers really need to switch to decaf) and his explanation of some Big Bang misconceptions, such as the one I just pointed out, as well as questions about the proof of the Big Bang.

Check it out, if you have the guts to learn! Bwa-hahahahaha! =)

Phil Plait at Bad Astonomy blog asks just that:
Is the government trying to kill us?

I kept trying to figure out what parts to just quote, but I can’t. The whole article is important and necessary, and I’m reprinting it below. Please take a moment to read it, and visit Phil’s blog and some of the sites he links to regularly to help keep yourself informed.

–begin quoted article–

That may seem like an inflammatory headline. It probably won’t after you read this.

A week or so ago I got an email from someone with the Union of Concerned Scientists — a watchdog group of scientists who, among other things, keep track of science abuses — saying they had released the results of a survey about science abuse at the Food and Drug Administration. Scientists at the FDA had responded to the survey, and many said that their opinions were ignored and even suppressed if they disagreed with results the FDA wanted.

Since this wasn’t really my field, I didn’t respond to the email. Obviously, I’ve changed my mind. With what went down at NASA over the George Deutsch affair, and with everything else we’re seeing from this antiscience government, I’m realizing that any scientific suppression is fair game for me to air out here.

What also changed my mind was reading Michael Stebbins’ article in Seed magazine about this: The FDA Is a Cauldron of Discontent. It’s a short article, but damning in its implications. And the webpages documenting this at the UCS are even scarier. Here’s a choice quotation:

“Scientific discourse is strongly discouraged when it may jeopardize an approval. . . . Whenever safety or efficacy concerns are raised on scientific grounds . . . these concerns are not taken seriously.”

What has happened to us? The scariest thing about that quotation, to me, is that it wouldn’t surprise me to hear it from a scientist in any number of government agencies. Scientific suppression is that widespread, and covers that wide a swath.

The FDA is directly responsible for approving drugs that we all take. Our lives depend on this! Stebbins, the author of the Seed magazine article, also writes a good blog called Sex, Drugs, and DNA, rang the alarm about this FDA suppression, and he complains:

Somehow every major news agency and most major newspapers missed the story. This is perplexing to me.

Sadly, it doesn’t surprise me. Even though the New York Times broke the story on NASA and George Deutsch, and it was extensively covered by science blogs, when I talked about this at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis in February, most scientists there had not heard of Deutsch. I found that although the scientists were very concerned about the suppression of science by this Administration, specific examples outside their own field were unknown to them.

This concerns me a great deal. How do we fight something if we don’t have the big picture?

One way is to educate yourself, of course. I read a lot of blogs– my blogroll on the right hand side of this page has a list of some of the blogs that fight antiscience. They have links to others, and so on. It doesn’t take very long to skim all those blogs, especially if you use an aggregator like Bloglines or any number of others. These blogs are not just people in their pajamas banging away on their keyboards; many of these are from respected scientists, science journalists, and people in the trenches who are fighting this war on science.

Hmmm… I almost wrote “encroaching storm” there in that last line, but that’s not accurate: we’re in the storm right now, and it’s at full gale. Science is sacrificed constantly today for political reasons, and it must stop.

Mid-term elections are coming up in November. Investigate your Senator and Congressperson. Find out where they stand on these and other important issues, and on November 7, 2006, take a stand.

I will. Suppressing science is the very essence of antidemocracy– it keeps the public in the dark about reality. Knowledge is our strength, and the ballot box is our weapon.

I’ll leave you with this, from Thomas Jefferson:

“I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

–end quoted article–

CNN.com – Dobbs: Why is the president ignoring our laws? – Jul 26, 2006

Excellent article. Good question: why?!

The article mentions that bush, as all presidents have, “has solemnly sworn to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution of the United States.”

Yet a bipartisan, 11-member committee of The American Bar Association “claims President Bush has violated that oath by issuing hundreds of ’signing statements’ to disregard selected provisions of the laws that Congress passed and he signed.”

Over 800 of these statement, bush has issued. All previous presidents combined have issued only 600!

The article doesn’t go into other issues of illegality such as domestic wiretapping without judicial oversight, aquisition and holding of domestic phone records, aquisition of domestic bank records, advocation of torture, releasing of covert information for personal purposes of revenge, and just general manipulation and misrepresentation of intelligence for the purpose of initiating an unprovoked and illegal war with Iraq.

Also, war profiteering (which is treason) with the exclusive contracts in Iraq to American companies owned by members of the administration or connected to in some financial means. Bribery, illegal lobbying involvement, and even money laundering (see Abramoff and K-Street.)

Like the bumper sticker says: “Someone please give bush a blowjob so we can impeach him!”

This week’s The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe has an interview with Bill Bennetta who’s a part of The Textbook League (http://www.textbookleague.org/). A watchdog group that monitors school textbooks and tries to get them improved. But the deal is, the textbook oligopoly of 4 publishers that publish all the textbooks perpetuate generations of plagiarism, generations of uncorrected errors and outright lies in information, often because of catering to the desires of the districts, the desire to oversimplify, political correctness, concepts of human superiority, and catering to teachers’ wants who suffer under the errors of their own education.

For example, middle school and high school textbooks even today still have the error of birds’ wings operate under the Bernoulli principle when that’s been LONG disproved. Likewise the idea of humans being at the top of an artificial and arbitrary “Ladder of Nature.” Claims like external fish reproduction being extremely wasteful and inefficient and ineffective as proof that they belong near the bottom of this Nature’s Ladder. When in fact, fish external reproduction is between 98-100% effective–yet, look at human reproduction: Many times more eggs produced that don’t get fertilized and human fertilization being very ineffective and highly inefficient considering energy expenditure and rate of success.

Another example was how one publisher (Holt) went through and made sure there were exactly equal references between male and female persons in the textbook. Yet, even so, despite this artificial skewing toward artificial equality, when the textbook came out in Texas, a feminist group actually counted and found there were more references to male animals and animal characters and made an outcry. And this happens all the time where special interest groups count references to a particular ethnicity or culture and demand equal inclusion to the detriment of facts.

For another example, Geo. Washington Carver for the sake of equality is credited in one book as being the father of modern economics, completely ignoring the three white guys who preceded him.
One middle school science book pretended to not know who invented the first heavier than air flying machine, by referring to them as “two inventors.” Not the Wright Brothers.
Other errors in major school textbooks that STILL exist: uranium is a synthetic element, aspirin is a polymer, and aluminum is a liquid at room temperature.

What to do? State governments have to pander to special interest groups and have their own financial interests involved, the publishers don’t really care about truth and accuracy, teacher’s organizations have shown less than reasonable interest in the problem (many teachers actually fight for the erroneous or biased versions either because the errors are what they learned and so they think is correct or they’re involved in whatever special interest group is forcing a particular bias of a textbook.) As a parent who tries to make a difference, schools aren’t going to listen because they bought the book and so they have a stake in defending their choice. Unfortunately in 9 months a student will be done with their class and so then the parent’s outrage tends to wane and dissolve then. It’s basically a race to the bottom as splashy pictures and layouts and contrived stories take precedence over facts and accuracy.

My wife and I are going to need to pour over our daughter’s textbooks when she starts getting them, and do whatever we can to make sure she’s a critical thinker that is capable of finding answers and not simply accepting everything taught in a public school textbook.

The guest really encourages this book:
“The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn”

The Textbook League site has a page that really got me going (heck, ALL of it gets me going!) regarding textbooks encouraging ignorance and creating beliefs without evidence:

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

This is one reason why American intelligence, education, has plummeted over the last couple generations. When our schools focus more on rote memorization of facts, often WRONG facts, and do not teach critical thinking. Don’t care about skepticism but encourage accepting whatever you’re told without question, and skewing information to a social desire while ignoring reality and factuality.

I lament for America. We’re seeing the coming end of the empire. We may already be right in the middle of it.

Weird. I work on my blog on two different machines: A WindowsXP Pro with Firefox and IE 7 beta, and a Fedora Core 5 with Firefox and Opera, and my current blog layout has always looked fine. But I had someone tell me recently, and show me screenshots, of my blog’s layout completely wacked. I had no idea. And, I couldn’t find a browser that would recreate the problem, but hey, you can’t argue with screenshots.

So, I did something I should have done from the get-go and check the site with a CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ . (If you do any Web work and don’t constantly use a validator to make sure your code is good, you’re a putz. Well, so I’m a putz now and then as well.)

Well, indeed there were a few small problems. But all is good now, so, we’ll see. =)

As for my writing, if you’ve noticed up in my progress graph up in the top left, it hasn’t gone up much recently. That’s becuse the weekend before last I spent my time (aside from family time) doing research. I’ve reached a point in the story where it’s time to lay some exposition down and really set up time and place. Since it takes place about 300 years in the future and in some near star systems, I had to really research some of our nearby star systems and the likelihood of them having life-supporting planets (with or without some terraforming done.) Come to find out, we have a lot of dark dwarfs around us that ocassionally flare up now and then with fatal doses of radiation. Yikes!

So, stellar research (which is certainly fun, my being an amateur astronomer in any case,) figuring up a plausable method of faster-than-light travel that hasn’t been done to death already (so far I can’t find any reference to the method I came up with) and can be believeable without crippling myself by sticking in too many crunchy bits, and solidifying my timeline of events from now to when the story takes place 300 years from now. I love that kind of work, but it can be time consuming.

So (man I start paragraphs with “so” way too often,) I got a couple thousand more words done this last weekend, and hope to do about another 4 thousand this coming weekend. (I hate that I pretty much only have time/energy/brain-power to write on weekends.) At this rate I’ll probably be half done around late September. Nertz.

Good ole Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has an article today:

“NASA decides there’s no place like home, and home is no place.”

He discusses the fact that due to probable pressure from the bush Administration, NASA’s official mission statement has removed the phrase: “To understand and protect our home planet….”

This of course has a lot of NASA scientists and researchers up in arms, considering how much NASA does to research climate change, meterology (like working to predict earthquakes and typhoons, for example,) geology, etc. It’s another tendril of hostility the administration has regarding issues that “cause them problems,” such as global warming.

I’m too tired to tirade about this. It really speaks for itself. bush and his greedy, criminal, ideological, fascist, theocratic, arrogant, dogmatic cronies suck beyond belief and have no right running a pluralist and free nation. Oh wait, they don’t want to, thus they’re trying to change it, wantonly ignoring reality in the process.

“Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has a blog entry today: “Wealth of Science.”

I really can’t say anything that could possibly add to what he has to say, except maybe Carl Sagan discusses this topic extensively in his book “Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,” and I recommend everyone should read this book before leaving high school.

So, reprinted here without permission, is Phil Plait’s observations on the wealth of science.

(start quote)

I was reading an essay recently, and the author distinguishes between money and wealth. I suppose I never thought about it, but he’s right, of course. Wealth is when you have something you need or want. Someone who is not wealthy does not have what they need or want. Money is a medium, a way of transferring wealth. It’s not even the only way, but it’s the one people think of.Then the author said something that literally startled me:

Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created.

He’s absolutely right. Again, wealth is not the same as money. Scientists take a relatively small amount of money (compared to, say, the cost of an attack helicopter or the building of a bridge) and turn it into wealth. Knowledge. Understanding. A brief moment of awe in the public when they grasp a little bit more of the Universe.

That is wealth, mental wealth. We humans are curious, and science both sates and drives that curiosity.

But all of that translates into real, tangible wealth. Knowledge and understanding can lead to technology. To build a computer means knowledge of how to make a silicon chip, of how silicon behaves, of what silicon is. That was science every step of the way, starting two thousand years ago. And building a computer, if you’re Dell, say, leads to wealth.

All of modern medicine is wealth. Despite the cries of supporters of non-traditional medicine, modern (or western if you prefer) medicine has made us wealthy in the U.S. Our lifespans have more than doubled in the past century. I am right now at the age where the male life expectancy was about 100 years ago. Yet I am here, because medicine can stop some diseases, and give me advice on how to live healthier (not to mention a million other things modern U.S. society does to keep its citizenry alive). If you like what I write, then you are wealthier than you would have been if I weren’t alive. And if you’re older than 45 or so, bonus!

A lot of this, maybe even the majority of the ground work, was done by scientists who were not trying to get rich. They wanted to understand things. They probably had that itch to explore, to see what is under that next rock, behind that fallen log. If things worked out one way, they worked in private, lived off of a day job, and maybe never got recognition for their personal conversion of money into wealth for the rest of humanity.

If things went a different way, they got a huge government subsidy, or a wise investor who saw the potential of wealth-making, or they were canny enough to market whatever it was they found. Even if they got rich, then they still produced a net wealth to the world.

But either way, that’s what scientists do. Maybe they make your life physically wealthier by extending your lifespan, and making you healthier while it happens. Or maybe it’s intangible, like knowing that a black hole with a billion times the Sun’s mass lies in the center of the elliptical galaxy M87.

But either way, life is more interesting, life is better.

That’s what scientists do.

(end quote)

If you’re a pre-Reagan Republican, it’s time to either take back your party or form a new one. Because the current Republican Party has been completely coopted by the American Taliban.
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has a post today: Am I Partisan? When I’m Forced To Be. He mentions how being ignorant and anti-science (reality) does not necessarily follow party lines… but the Republican Party has gone further and further down the slope of dogmatic and delusional religious control of politics as an official Party platform. The Texas Republican Party has already advocated creationism, and now South Dakota Rep’ Party.

See: http://angryastronomer.blogspot.com/2006/07/south-dakota-republicans-dont-even.html

As Phil says, this is, aside from being ignorant and anti-reality, also non-Constitutional. Any political party endorsing creationism is nothing more than advocating religion, and one particular religion no less. There is absolutely no scientific basis or credibility to creationism and its entire existance as a “theory” (in the non-scientific theory meaning of the word) is based soley and entirely on a single religious belief.

Add to that, prez. bush’s coming veto of the stem cell bill. It’s an ideological stance based on a religious belief that is counter to the desires of 66% of the country he’s the supposed to represent. And it’s completely unreasonable and illogical. Thousands of unused 100-cell embryos are destroyed, unused during invitro fertilization processes, and this bill would use those blastocysts for stem cell research instead of just letting them be destroyed.

It’s a bi-partisan supported bill, and bush refused to meet with the Dem’ AND Republican sponsors of the bill. They asked to meet with him to explain the strict ethical limits included in the bill, and he refused. And instead, he’s making a stance that says he’d rather have embryos destroyed instead of being used to save thousands of lives.

“But there’s no proof that embryonic stem cells are better than adult stem cells in research,” these anti-science proponents say. Why is there little research on the effectiveness of embryonic stem cell research? Oh maybe because bush completely crippled embryonic stem cell research in it’s infancy in 2001. Cut funding and forced scientists to use barely useable existing strains for research.

The neo-con controlled Republican Party wants to destroy the government, pure and simple. No exageration. They have utter hostility toward government and so continue to allow incompetance, privatize portions that should not be privatized, assign people to positions who have no ability or have hatred for the subject they’re heading (see Bad Astonomy entries on appointee Deutsch and NASA, as well as the resumes of FEMA managers Brown and Albaugh, and Homeland Security Chertoff, just to name a few inappropriate appointees.) bush sets up rediculous programs like “No Child Left Behind” and then unfunds it as a way to show public school doesn’t work in order to dismantle it, tells NASA to get to Mars and then not only unfunds it but cuts NASA’s funding. Even though the Defense Department spends in one week the entire annual budget for NASA. Literally.
As a progressive libertarian I realize there are some things we NEED government for, and a LOT of things we do not need government involved in. But there’s a difference between small government run well and small government run incompetantly and corruptly and illegally. And this administration, the neo-cons in Congress, prove time and time again that they see government as a way to give power to the rich, create a greater gulf between the haves and have-nots in their creation of an oligarchy, eliminate the middle-class, get rid of science and knowledge and critical thinking so as to better manipulate the masses.

And it’s been going on slowly since the 80’s, but has exploded since bush illegally took the Presidency in 2000.

Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party

Moderate Republicans, pre-Reagan Republicans, Republicans who do not resent science and reality and who do not want your Party controlled by robber-barron religious zealots who would love nothing better than to tear up the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and rule with fascist fear-mongering and greed and corruption, take your Party back!

If you’re voting Republican this November, vote in new Republicans at least who better represent leaders of the country and not ideologues. People who are qualified to run a country, and not people who are better suited to running a Southern Baptist Church. The current government is really nothing better than a modernized and capitalist version of the Taliban. Get rid of them!

Gather.com (sort of like MySpace, but a little more grown up and meant for writers and artists and essayists, etc, vs. for goths, emos, and angsty teens and predators of teens,) is running a short fiction/non-fiction competition where the winner gets to have their previously unpublished story put on Amazon Shorts–a place where people can read short stories for .49.

The site has been for known and previously published authors, so this Gather competition is nice for people who normally wouldn’t qualify. Like me! *grin*

So I submitted a story for the competition, and for a limited time people can read and rate it.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976767078

In the judging, viewer rating is only a part of the score that decides the winner, but any little bit helps.

Not that I have any chance of winning. The story, to be honest, isn’t that great. It’s one of my early ones and has only gone through a couple of drafts. But I thought hey, why not!

So, check it out, and if nothing else, maybe send me a comment on what you think of it.

Shakespeare Stout

My review.

From: Rogue Ales Brewery / Brewer’s on the Bay in Oregon, United States
Style: American Stout

overall: 3.75
appearance: 4.5 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 4 | mouthfeel: 4 | drinkability: 3.5

I couldn’t really detect a scent. (But then, I may have allergies acting up.)
But the pour was great! Deep, rick, thick black. Opaque.
The head is a full finger thick, and is indeed thick. Dark, dark brown and rich. Slow to dissipate, but does dissipate completely.

I started it cold. It tasted both sweet and bitter at the same time. At first all I could get was a slight coffee taste. Hoppy. And, a little flat aftertaste like the end of a Bud. That part wasn’t pleasanr. But I don’t know if it was because I got used to it, or getting warmer improved it, but that flat, bitter, sour aftertaste didn’t last through the first glass, and not at all in the last two glasses.

Did I mention the bottle is large enough to fill too smallish pilsner glasses?

After it warmed up a bit, I started tasting a cocoa flavor. Not chocolate, but cocoa. Almost like a cafe mocha… but with hopps.

Creamy mouthfeel. And not a sticky creamy that causes that back of the pallate linger. But just a rich consistancy.

Kind of heavy–I felt full after the whole bottle. I don’t even want to think of how many calories this liquid bread has! *grin*

[ serving type: bottle ]

Here’s something interesting.

Lucifer is mentioned only once in the Bible:

“How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!”

– Isaiah 14:12 (NRSV)

(Of course in contrast to the popular belief, Lucifer when read in context of the chapter, is likely refering to the King of Babylon, not some fallen angel and certainly not Satan (which actually means in Hebrew “adversary,” meaning he was a servant of God who, as in the story of Job, had the job of testing the faithful for God.))

Now, the only other place where the “star of the morning” is refered to is in Revelations:

“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”

– Revelations 22:16 (NRSV)

(By the way, how can he be descendant from David if Joseph was not really his father? Well, the answer to that is that the idea of the virgin birth was added later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth)

Anyway, it’s an interesting coincidence. Would make for an interesting speculative-fiction story.